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Another Crumbling Reactor Springs a Tritium Leak
mdsolar writes "The decrepit nuclear reactor Vermont Yankee has sprung a radioactive leak similar to those at other poorly run reactors in Illinois (Braidwood, Byron and Dresden), Arizona (Palo Verde), and New York (Indian Point). Greenpeace noted 3 years ago that radioactive tritium leaks even threaten Champagne from France. Tritium and its decay product helium 3 are incredibly valuable and there is currently a shortage of helium 3. What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape
Can someone please explain how I can leverage this situation to develop superpowers?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Is this the fucking Greenpeace sight?
Can't we keep the Luddites from being /. editors?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
is my beer in danger? That's what I would like to know!
We're talking about *tritium* here, not plutonium. It's just not all that dangerous as far as radioactive materials go. You might well be *WEARING* some right now if you have a watch that glows in the dark. Unless they're releasing hundreds of pounds of it at a time here (they aren't, there's ~165lbs of the stuff in the US right now) , any farm even a kilometer away is not a real health hazard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
While I appreciate your support of nuclear energy, I'm going to ask you to educate yourself a bit. There are ZERO reactors that use tritium. It is an unavoidable by-product of fission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
Nuclear power has had lots of subsidies, such as heavy governmental involvement in research, that I think would go a ways to offset whatever costs fossil fuels can externalize.
SSC
Time to switch to thorium! *Seriously*, time to switch to thorium..
Build new nuclear reactors, specifically of the design that, either, doesn't use tritium or is melt down proof. Why are the same people that bitch about the safety of nuclear reactors all at once the people whole also hold it back from being a, somewhat, excellent energy source? Uncool green peace, uncool.
Exactly. We should be embracing the technology and improving it with newer installations and better designs. But instead, I'm sure we'll hear from every anti-group in the world about how this leak is the sign of the apocalypse or some nonsense.
We seem to have done a pretty damn good job with the automobile over the last 50 years of improvements. Why we can't seem to do the same thing with this energy source is beyond me.
The linked article says that the tritium levels are only half what must be reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And let's think about what 17,000 parts per liter is. A liter of water contains 3.34192092 * 1025 molecules. So those 17,000 atoms mean that, assuming one tritum atom per molecule, 0.00000000000000000005% of the water is contaminated with tritium. At 3.3ppb the concentration of uranium in seawater is several orders of magnitude higher. This is not to say that the leak shouldn't be found and fixed, but the notion that this demonstrates that our nuclear power plants are unsafe is absurd.
...or you could bring the cost of nuclear down through cutting red tape for building new ones and funding research into more efficient ones and not punish the consumers who will be stuck with coal in the meantime.
I guess that doesn't fatten the right purses though, does it?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
Well maybe if somebody, HINT HINT, would let us build new, safer, and more efficient ones, instead of having to rely on the older ones.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"What, besides shutting down leaky old nuclear plants, could be done to better control release of tritium into the environment?"
Maintain the plants and keep them in operation. Really, they won't hurt you; and the electricity they produce is cheap and clean.
The power.... of SCIENCE! *bum bum BUM*
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Aside from cost, public opinion is the real factor holding back exactly what you describe. It's a total case of NIMBY. Not in my back yard. "Nobody" wants a nuclear anything anywhere near them. Nuclear bad. Radiation bad. Eeeeevil.
So. All you need to do is convince everyone you meet to stop being afraid of nuclear energy. While you're at it, please do the same for fears of the boogeyman, terrorists, cloning, cancer, and people with different coloured skin.
"Oh no... he found the
You can relax. Nothing gives him the right to decide anything that affects you -- I think it's just an opinion. It's probably based on the knowledge that burning coal leads to smog and greenhouse gas emissions. If the economic cost of these pollutants aren't reflected in the cost of their consumption, then we're using too much of them. It's an externality. It's not based on the relative purity of one or another way of generating power. It's based on the absolute cost of an economic activity.
It's not immediately clear that nuclear power doesn't have its own externalities or that the externalities can be approximated for either alternative, but that doesn't really make what he's saying any more or less of an opinion.
Well, apart from the already mentioned fact that tritium is a natural by-product of fission, most modern reactors (pressurized water reactors or boiling water reactors, yes, not even pebble bed) are "melt down proof." Chernobyl is a superb example of why even old American designs are very, very safe and the old Russian designs are very, very insane.
It is extremely disheartening to see someone so clearly misinformed about such a very easily researched topic.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Good grief, could this /. article possibly be more biased? Who the hell does Slashdot think it is, the MSM? I thought the Internet was supposed to be an improvement.
Lets just agree with the idiots at Greenpeace.... on one condition, that if we agree the current plants are operating far beyond their original design life they agree with us that the solution is to replace them with modern safer reactors.
Democrat delenda est
Careful! You need to use the correct product for this problem.
Three words:
Still produce tritium
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Helium-3 != Helium-4
Helium-3 is a rare isotope of Helium on the earth. It has promise for an alternative nuclear fusion fuel as well as whatever else scientists like to do with rare isotopes.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Tritium is the common name for hydrogen-3 (3H), which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Like ordinary hydrogen (1H or hydrogen-1, called protium) and deuterium (2H or hydrogen-2), tritium has a single proton in its nucleus. Unlike ordinary hydrogen, deuterium and tritium have neutrons in their nucleus. Deuterium has one neutron in its nucleus and is stable, while tritium's nucleus contains two neutrons and is unstable. Tritium decays spontaneously to helium-3 (3He) through ejection of a beta particle (essentially a high-energy electron). The half-life of tritium is about 12.32 years. Since the number of protons determines chemical bonding, tritium behaves like ordinary hydrogen and can replace ordinary hydrogen in water molecules. Thus, tritium readily cycles through the hydrologic and biologic components of the environment. Tritium has three times the mass of ordinary hydrogen due to the two extra neutrons. Because of this extra mass, water containing tritium evaporates at a slightly slower rate than water containing only hydrogen-1.
The unit of measure of tritium in water is the tritium unit (TU). One tritium unit equals 1 tritium atom in 1018 hydrogen atoms. In SI units, one tritium unit is about 0.118 bequerels per liter (Bq/L), where the bequerel is one decay per second. In picocuries per liter, 1 TU is approximately 3.19 pCi/L. Tritium occurs in very small quantities naturally, being produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays. Natural (pre-nuclear age) levels of tritium in precipitation are on the order of 1 to 5 TU. Nuclear-weapons testing during the 1950s and 1960s created relatively large amounts of tritium in the atmosphere that can be detected in ground water that was recharged during this period. Greatly elevated levels of tritium can be present in ground water contaminated with radioactive wastes.
It hasn't been until recently that the detection of the very miniscule ammounts of Tritium leakage through several feet of rebar, concrete, steel, and lead have been detectible as the units of measure are so minute to be nearly indetectable. As such, they don't pose much of a threat to humans, or other creatures in general. The half-life of Tritium in the typicaly human is roughly ten days, and is of such a low yield of energy to be about as harmful as living in Colorado being bombarded with a multiple increase of Cosmic rays versus people who live closer to sea level. In fact, when measuring the radioactive levels of Tritium you will notice that the K+ ions in bananas are radioactive as well.
Basically, all of this overreacting to 'radioactive' stuff should result in EVERYTHING being banned that's radioactive. If they were so concerned with such low level contamination, they should do away with Limestone rock on the walls of schools (radioactive), granite countertops (radioactive), bananas (radioactive), and all manner of other things that emit EM and positron/neutron radiation on such low levels.
The irony of all the craziness over 'radioactivity' is that on average, people who work near nuclear reactors, or have 'any' exposure on an ongoing basis at a very low level are typically healthier than the crazy people scared of all this radiation floating around.
If you take all the TLD (thermo-luminescent devices) worn by all Department of Energy employees and Nuclear Sub/Carrier personnel to measure very accurately the radiation exposure over a year, and add up every TLD in the DOE and Navy, it is still less radiation than 1 person receives by living in Denver Colorado for a year.
Thus, by this non-sensical IT'S RADIOACTIVE IT MUST BE BAD FOR US logic, we should quarantine Colorado, because obviously it's going to end up becoming a mutated Zombieland where only those highly paranoid, and well adept at using all manner of sharp, blunt, and dangerous instruments for maiming Zombies will survive.
send in homer Simpson to fix it and also let him run sector 7G
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Democrat delenda est
How are PWRs meltdown proof? Three Mile Island was a PWR.
You've got to love the innumeracy of the reporter on this article:
by Wednesday, the contamination had jumped to 17,000 parts per liter.
Ah yes, parts per liter. One of those quaint old-fashioned units of concentration, I guess, like horsepower per cubit. I wish someone could remind me how we convert to a more familiar unit like grams per liter, moles per liter, parts per million.
Any nuclear fission reactor generates neutrons. If water is used in the reactor (e.g. for cooling), some of the hydrogen in the water will absorb neutrons and become deuterium or tritium. If the reactor uses heavy water (e.g. CANDU reactor, which is not the case here) tritium production is maximized, since you need to absorb less neutrons to produce the same amount of tritium. Tritium is a weak beta emitter, so it is only dangerous if you ingest it in sufficient amounts. It decays into stable Helium-3. Even natural water has some trace amounts of tritium in it. FWIW the maximum permissible level of Tritium in Canada is way, way larger than in the USA. Guess where the 'C' in CANDU comes from...
FWIW Tritium is not the thing I am most concerned about in terms of nuclear waste. Iodine-131 or Strontium-90, now those are nasty.
Question: What weighs more a kilogram of U-238 or a kilogram of Co-60?
Answer: Wait long enough and the correct answer is Co-60...
Sorry, couldn't resist. Just an alpha versus beta and gamma particle thing...
In reality though, the bio-half life of tritium of a week or two combined with it being a weak beta emitter means it really isn't all that dangerous in even close to the quantities discussed here... This is just a non-story.
Would you stick to that position if you were burning in a cleansing nuclear fire?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wow, awesome deduction there, Sherlock.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This isn't an isolated incident. Vermont Yankee has been plagued by problems like this, though generally less critical. There's been a photo circulating around of an incident a few years back, where one of the cooling structures fell apart. (Really... fell apart - the photo looks pretty sick, and you wonder what neglect gets it to that point.) I seem to remember that a few years back that lost some spent fuel rods, too. I don't remember how that turned out - I think it was a bookkeeping problem, and they were in the cooling pond all along.
Entergy took the plant over a few years ago, and people here weren't too happy about control going to some out of our region (Texas) firm. Plus I'm under the impression that there was supposed to be some sort of decommissioning fund being built up during operating years, so they could properly take care of the plant at end-of-life. Now there's something about no money to take care of shutdown costs, etc. (Sounds to me like raiding a pension fund, but that's probably unfair.)
Now with a rather checkered safety and maintenance record, they're trying to get an operating license extension. In addition, they're putting in for a rather hefty rate increase at the same time. People here aren't too happy.
Others have suggested building *safe* plants. Personally I blame the US Navy. I once heard that basically we have landlubbing ship/submarine reactors for our domestic electric power plants for the sake of the US Navy. The type of reactors we use in the US are great for power density, not so great for safety by-design, not so great for cleanup, etc. But the Navy gets the benefit of a "nuclear industry" that practices their kind of reactors. Nuclear training in the US is essentially all for Navy reactors. Unfortunately, this contributed to the death of the nuclear industry in the US. Had we gone with one of the inherently safe, inherently cleaner designs, or had we taken the French standardization-based approach instead of a whole pile of similar one-offs, we might still have a nuclear industry, cleaner air, cheaper power, etc.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Actually, the cause of failure is well known, just read the Wiki article. They were testing emergency shutoff procedures, specifically the ability of the steam turbines to continue operating the cooling water pumps using their rotational inertia, like a flywheel. They stuffed up the test procedure. Operators with little understanding of the complex interactions of the nuclear poisons created during low power operation put the reactor into a dangerous configuration.
Ya, and it was a bad design. Another great example of how things aren't done anymore.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
yeah, I have leveled up all I can on mithril.
Of course the salient point about TMI is that even though it was a 98% meltdown (deformation of fuel rods due to excessive heat), the whole thing was 100% contained. The small amount of radiation leaked was because some genius after the fact thought it would be a good idea to vent the hydrogen bubble in the containment dome to the atmosphere, despite the fact that it contained Xenon-133 and Krypton-85.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
File under "OSPD" ("operation successful, patient died").
Eric Baird
In case there is any doubt regarding Triated water's effect on living beings the following information may help. Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects, so I'll just quote from those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more. For those who think "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones"
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
References;
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Public opinion is the cost problem: the major difficulty in building a new nuclear plant isn't the actual construction, but fighting the inevitable and endless stream of lawsuits. It's ridiculous.
And rational decision making has no place in todays emotion driven politics.
I wish this was just sarcasm.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Is it well run if it is leaking radioactive waste into the ground water? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Groundwater_contamination Maybe that is part of their mission statement?
It's more commercial opinion than public opinion. If the old nuclear designs were as good as advertised you wouldn't need a government to build them, so consider what the private sector thinks of the idea. "You want to build something that costs that much and won't be running for years with electricity that costs more than the market rate? Hahahaha, dream on".
There are some that have sucumbed to the "too cheap to meter" PR that will dispute the above problem and I can only suggest to them that they get some figures for an actual real single plant - not some rubbery agregate of numbers where the actual source data is unavailable (like the usual reply I get when I ask this). In the process of looking for this information you will see exactly what I mean, the reality doesn't match the PR.
The near future however holds out the prospect of smaller reactors that don't take anywhere near as long to build or cost anywhere near as much with a possibility of savings via mass production. If the Hyperion stuff is as good as advertised that will be one example, and the Chinese may also get there with pebble bed in the next few years now that they have a prototype.
Is obvious. Stop being religious about nuclear technology.
Yes, it has its dangers. But unless you are totally insane, you have to agree that a modern reactor is a lot better than the decade old ones we're running on right now. The absolute worst case scenario - and it is happening in many first-world countries right now, is that there's a ban on the construction of new reactors, while the permissions to run the old ones are extended again and again, well beyond their lifetimes.
Allow the building of new reactors again. Make it a condition that for each new one built, an old one has to be dismantled. In other words: Give the whole lot a refreshment. That doesn't make things worse, and even if you'd like to see them all shut down you'll have to agree that 10 new and modern ones are a whole lot better than 10 old and leaky ones.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org